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Archive for April 30th, 2015

Here is one more whiny opinion piece by a Catholic ‘leader’ about the Obama Administration order that says if you get federal money, you have to offer abortion services. That puts the US Conference of Catholic Bishops between a rock and a hard place doesn’t it? They can’t take care of the ‘unaccompanied alien children’ they have been paid for years to shelter, unless they provide access to abortions.

It is a very simple concept that every one of these Catholic writers try very hard to muddy the waters on: If you take Caesar’s money, you have to follow Caesar’s rules!

John Garvey is the president of The Catholic University of America in Washington.

Last year a crisis unfolded as thousands of children, some as young as 6, made their way alone from their Central American home countries and attempted a dangerous crossing into the United States. Many little ones died lonely deaths in the desert. Thousands were fortunately rescued by federal authorities and now fall under our government’s care.

It’s an open question whether — or how many — of these children should stay, but they are children. The federal government cannot simply house them in prisons. It must find ways to occupy them constructively — to educate them, even — while they await final disposition of their court cases.

Uncle Sam outsourced this work, as he often does, to the U.S. bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services*** and other experienced refugee organizations, some of which are faith-based. That made sense. [Outsourced is, of course, a nice way of saying the feds PAY us!—ed]

But on Christmas Eve (presumably to avoid attention), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published an interim final rule that could disrupt this arrangement. It is designed to guarantee abortion access for minors in this precarious position, on the off chance that any of them might have become pregnant as a result of having been sexually abused.

[….]

“This,” the coalition of Christian groups wrote, “will have the effect of disqualifying our organizations from being primary grantees, the very organizations that have the most experience in providing services to unaccompanied minors and are best qualified to serve as grantees. Such a discriminatory effect would immediately work to the detriment of the children who are the intended beneficiaries of the program.” [It is all for the “children” except that it isn’t, it is about the Bishops’ money!—ed]

*** We examined the USCCB’s Migration Fund hereand learned that the majority (98%!) of their millions and millions of dollars each year comes from you—the US taxpayer! Of course Catholics are free to care for migrant children, refugees and immigrants generally with their own private charity and thus not have this rule, that flies in the face of their supposed religious beliefs (from the guy the majority of Catholics voted for) dictating what they do.

But, alas in order to hold on to their principles, they would have to dig into their own private pockets instead of stealing from the taxpayer.

GOTHENBURG, Sweden — Mona Walter is on a mission. Her mission is for more Muslims to know what is in the Koran. She says if more Muslims knew what was in the Koran, more would leave Islam.

Walter came to Sweden from Somalia as a war refugee when she was 19. She says she was excited about joining a modern European nation with equal rights for women. But as a young Muslim woman, that was not the Sweden she encountered.

A Real Introduction to Islam

It was in Sweden that she first experienced radical Islam on a daily basis.

“I discovered Islam first in Sweden. In Somalia, you’re just a Muslim, without knowing the Koran. But then you come to Sweden and you go to mosque and there is the Koran, so you have to cover yourself and you have to be a good Muslim.”

Walter says she grew up in Somalia never having read the Koran.

“I didn’t know what I was a part of. I didn’t know who Mohammed was. I didn’t know who Allah was. So, when I found out, I was upset. I was sad and I was disappointed,” she recalled.

And it was in Sweden that Walters says she discovered Allah is a god who hates, and that Islam is not a religion of peace.

[….]

“I mean, Muslims are normally good people like everyone else,” she continued. “But then when they read the Koran, then they become a killing machine.”

“This so-called ISIS or el Shabab or Boko Haram, they’re not like extremists. They’re not fanatical. They’re just good Muslims, good Muslims who follow the teachings of Islam. The prophet Mohammed, he did that. They’re doing what he did,” she explained.

Political correctness (the promotion of the ‘religion of peace’ myth) has gone to such an extreme here in the US that women like Walter, who probably exist, have no way of ever coming out because they know they will have no protection by so-called progressive women’s rights groups who are by their silence carrying water for the Islamists.

If you have just dropped in here at RRW today for the first time, you should readour reportfrom my visit to St. Cloud, MN, a small city a little over an hour from Minneapolis where Lutheran Social Service is dropping off Somali refugees who are now causing tension in the school system.

Although the Left-leaning St. Cloud Times couldn’t control itself completely and put up one story as newsthat was really an opinion piece, we are pretty satisfied that for the first time ever the readers of that paper received a tutorial of sorts on how the refugee resettlement program works.

The contractors, such as Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, are often happy to promote the idea that refugees simply “find their way” to your towns, rather than to tell you that the UN is picking them and the US State Department is assigning them to 9 contractors and 350 subcontractors (some masquerading as ‘religious’ charities), and paying them with your tax dollars to distribute them!

The original article generated lots of discussion, see the comments, and here is a letter to the editor published yesterday from Tennessean Don Barnett who has had over two decades of experience following the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program.

I would like to draw your attention to the airfare loan issue. Shortly after refugees arrive in the US the contractor begins nagging the refugee to repay the airfare loan money (that you ‘loaned’ them through the federal treasury). The State Department to my knowledge has not reported how much is actually ever collected, but we know that the contractors keep a chunk of what they manage to wring out of the refugees for themselves!

Remember readers this is big business for the contractors and for the industries in Minnesota looking for cheap labor!

Stating that Lutheran Social Services “receives $850 per arrival” is misleading. Refugee resettlement is very profitable, and money is earned in many ways. If a volunteer spends time with an LSS refugee or donates, say, a used couch, LSS submits a bill to the feds for the volunteer’s time or the used couch and receives cash from the misnamed federal Match Grant program.

If LSS’s parent organization collects the airfare from the refugee — which was provided by the taxpayer to the refugee as a loan — the organization pockets a full 25 percent of the amount as a collection fee.This relatively small program alone means millions for the larger refugee contractors. [In its 2012 annual report, for example, the contractor US Conference of Catholic Bishops reported over $3 million in cash for the collection of airfare loans.—ed]

There are many grant programs providing an opaque stream of money from almost all departments of the U.S. government. As a state refugee coordinator notes in a 2012 GAO report, “local affiliate funding is based on the number of refugees they serve, so affiliates have an incentive to maintain or increase the number of refugees they resettle each year rather than allowing the number to decrease.”

It is hardly the case that “refugees receive a one-time federal grant of $1,125” and “after that, refugees are on their own.” Most refugees are placed into one or another federal assistance program by the refugee resettlement contractors.

Just in the past few weeks Congressional Research Services provided data about welfare usage among refugees. Among refugees who had arrived in a recent 5-year period, 56 percent were receiving Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance, 74.2 percent were on food stamps, 22.8 percent were in public housing, and 47.1 percent were on some form of cash assistance.

Unfortunately, it is the refugee resettlement contractor, such as LSS, which leaves the refugees “on their own” — abandoning them to the care of the taxpayer.

See our complete archive on St. Cloud going back many years byclicking here.

If you are interested in listening to my interview with Dan ‘OX’ Ochsner on KNSI radio in St. Cloud, click here and scroll down to podcasts part 1 and 2 on April 23, 2015.